Television (TV) programming may be delivered to a receiving device by a variety of means. Delivery mechanisms in use today include terrestrial broadcast, satellite broadcast, cable, and IPTV (internet protocol television, which may be delivered via an IP network). Historically, analogue transmission schemes were used, but increasingly digital transmission schemes are displacing these. Digital transmission schemes typically follow the Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) standards. Regardless of the delivery mechanism, a receiving device receives and decodes the transmission signal. The receiving device can be incorporated into a display (a television) or may be arranged to be connected to a display device (a set-top box, STB).
Today's STBs and televisions can show more then one channel at a time, if one channel is displayed at the same time as another it is called picture in picture (PIP). The STBs and televisions that are being manufactured now can handle many simultaneous streams, which could allow a number of interesting features. One such feature is to display views of an event from many different camera angles at the same time. It should be noted that the usefulness of such a feature increases with the prevalence of high definition televisions, but such a television is not required for these features to be useful.
A problem with delivering such multistream content to users is that it is difficult to provide a scalable solution given the practical limitations of the TV distribution system. Today, no content is created for distribution in this way, primarily because existing attempts to deploy multi-stream features have been created by different middleware manufacturers attempting to setup players in a receiving device and to provide a user interface to allow the user to move channels around on the screen.
However, such a service is limited to the middleware manufacturer's system, and content creators would be required to provide multistream content tailored for each middleware solution, which would be a lengthy process. Because of this split in responsibility between content creation and content distribution, proprietary middleware multistream solutions have not been successful.
Accordingly, there is a need for an improved method and apparatus for multistream content.